John M. Carroll

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Pennsylvania State University

Couples often experience a decrease in closeness as they cope with the demands of parenthood. Existing technologies have supported parenting and parental collaboration. However, these technologies do not adequately support closeness in co-parenting. We use scenarios and design probes to brainstorm with 10 new parent couples to explore and envision...

Couples often experience a decrease in closeness as they cope with the demands of parenthood. Existing technologies have supported parenting and parental collaboration. However, these technologies do not adequately support closeness in co-parenting. We use scenarios and design probes to brainstorm with 10 new parent couples to explore and envision...

This study investigates the dynamics of peer-to-peer support exchange (P2P SE) in non-monetized sharing economies. Utilizing a scenario-based within-subjects experiment with 93 participants across nine conditions, we examined how support request visibility and recognition for making requests affect perceived social costs of seeking help. We also ex...

Infrastructure is an indispensable part of human life. Over the past decades, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has paid increasing attention to human interactions with infrastructure. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review on infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, one of the most influential communities in HCI. We colle...

Traditional image annotation tasks rely heavily on human effort for object selection and label assignment, making the process time-consuming and prone to decreased efficiency as annotators experience fatigue after extensive work. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages the visual understanding capabilities of large multimodal models...

AI tools, particularly large-scale language model (LLM) based applications such as ChatGPT, have the potential to mitigate qualitative research workload. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 participants and held a co-design session with 13 qualitative researchers to develop a framework for designing prompts specifically c...

As immersive social platforms like VRChat increasingly adopt gen-erative AI (GenAI) technologies, it becomes critical to understand how community members perceive, negotiate, and utilize these tools. In this preliminary study, we conducted a qualitative analysis of VRChat-related Discord discussions, employing a deductive coding framework to identi...

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled new AI-powered applications that help people with visual impairments (PVI) receive natural language descriptions of their surroundings through audible text. We investigated how this emerging paradigm of visual assistance transforms how PVI perform and manage their daily tasks. Moving beyond usability asse...

Assistive technologies for people with visual impairments (PVI) have made significant advancements, particularly with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time sensor technologies. However, current solutions often require PVI to switch between multiple apps and tools for tasks like image recognition, navigation, and obstacle det...

Virtual Reality (VR) has the capacity to offer unparalleled immersive experiences, particularly in the domain of horror gaming. However, creating both practical and enjoyable VR applications necessitates a nuanced understanding of user emotions and behaviors. To fill this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants who engaged...

Positive co-parenting is critical for parenting and child outcomes, especially for new parents, who suffer from an increase in conflicts and decreased marital relationships. Investigating the practices, strategies, and challenges of new parents' co-parenting, including collaborating, supporting, and relating to each other, can help better understan...

Identity work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has examined the asset-based design of marginalized groups who use technology to improve their quality of life. Our study illuminates the identity work of people with disabilities, specifically, visual impairments. We interviewed 45 BlindTokers (blind users on TikTok) from various backgrounds to und...

Generative AI has drawn significant attention from stakeholders in higher education. As it introduces new opportunities for personalized learning and tutoring support, it simultaneously poses challenges to academic integrity and leads to ethical issues. Consequently, governing responsible AI usage within higher education institutions (HEIs) becomes...

Generative AI has drawn significant attention from stakeholders in higher education. As it introduces new opportunities for personalized learning and tutoring support, it simultaneously poses challenges to academic integrity and leads to ethical issues. Consequently, governing responsible AI usage within higher education institutions (HEIs) becomes...

Community building is imperative after the COVID-19 pandemic and political division in the US. To identify a community project's role in community building, we conducted a case study of an innovative mural painting project. Through 19 in-depth interviews with three groups of stakeholders (one artist, local borough officials, and residents), we expl...

Qualitative research, renowned for its in-depth exploration of complex phenomena, often involves time-intensive analysis, particularly during the coding stage. Existing software for qualitative evaluation frequently lacks automatic coding capabilities, user-friendliness, and cost-effectiveness. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3...

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational technology aiding people with visual impairments (VI) through real-time video chat communication with sighted agents. We conducted a literature review and interviewed 12 RSA users to understand the technical and navigational challenges faced by both agents and users. The technical chal...

As Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, they demonstrate significant enhancements in performance and an expansion of functionalities, impacting various domains, including education. In this study, we conducted interviews with 14 students to explore their everyday interactions with ChatGPT. Our preliminary findings reveal that stud...

People with visual impairments perceive their environment non-visually and often use AI-powered assistive tools to obtain textual descriptions of visual information. Recent large vision-language model-based AI-powered tools like Be My AI are more capable of understanding users' inquiries in natural language and describing the scene in audible text;...

Community management is critical for stakeholders to collaboratively build and sustain communities with socio-technical support. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on the community members and the platform, with little attention given to the developers who act as intermediaries between the platform and community members and d...

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has consistently focused on the experiences of users moderated by social media platforms. Recently, scholars have noticed that moderation practices could perpetuate biases, resulting in the marginalization of user groups undergoing moderation. However, most studies have primarily addressed marginalizat...

There has been extensive research on the experiences of individuals with visual impairments on text- and image-based social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. However, little is known about the experiences of visually impaired users on short-video platforms like TikTok. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview study with 30 BlindTo...

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions exacerbated food insecurity in the United States. Government-led infrastructure was depleted as a result of a dramatic increase in the number of individuals requesting basic necessities and food aid, and grassroots attempts to alleviate the resource shortage increased. The Comm...

Understanding and recognizing emotions are important and challenging issues in the metaverse era. Understanding, identifying, and predicting fear, which is one of the fundamental human emotions , in virtual reality (VR) environments plays an essential role in immersive game development, scene development, and next-generation virtual human-computer...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought wide-ranging, unanticipated societal changes as communities rushed to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In response, mutual aid groups bloomed online across the United States to fill in the gaps in social services and help local communities cope with infrastructural breakdowns. Unlike many previous disasters, t...

Both sensor networks and data fusion are essential foundations for developing the smart home Internet of Things (IoT) and related fields. We proposed a multi-channel sensor network construction method involving hardware, acquisition, and synchronization in the smart home environment and a smart home data fusion method (SHDFM) for multi-modal data (...

Thematic analysis is a cornerstone of qualitative research, yet it is often marked by labor-intensive procedures. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially with large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, present potential avenues to enhance qualitative data analysis. This research delves into the effectiveness of ChatGPT...

In times of crisis, international travel becomes tenuous and anxiety provoking. The crisis informatics and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has paid increasing attention to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in various crisis settings. However, little is known about the travelers' actual experiences in whole trip...

COVID-19 changed society in terms of employment, food security, and mental health, affecting all segments of the population. Surging demands for a wide range of support could not be met solely by government-led disaster assistance that experienced breakdowns in the initial phase of the pandemic. The nature of the pandemic as a global, long-haul dis...

This study looks at water quality monitoring and management as a new form of community engagement. Through a series of a unique research method called `design hackathons', we engaged with a hyperlocal community of citizens who are actively involved in monitoring and management of their local watershed. These design hackathons sought to understand t...

Exercising in a group context effectively motivates physical activity participation. However, gyms and health clubs closed in-person services due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Online group exercise classes became an emerging service that attracted many participants. Exercisers are predicted to continue participation even after the restriction is...

Smart city infrastructures enable the routine interleaving and integration of diverse activities, including new ways to play, to be playful, and to participate. We discuss three examples: (1) citizen-based water quality monitoring, which combines outdoor exercise and social interaction with safeguarding public water supplies, (2) a digital scavenge...

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) is an emerging navigational aid for people with visual impairments (PVI). Using scenario-based design to illustrate our ideas, we developed a prototype showcasing potential applications for computer vision to support RSA interactions. We reviewed the prototype demonstrating real-world navigation scenarios with an RSA...

Citizen science project leaders collecting field data in a hyperlocal community often face common socio-technical challenges, which can potentially be addressed by sharing innovations across different groups through peer-to-peer collaboration. However, most citizen science groups practice in isolation, and end up re-inventing the wheel when it come...

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology for people with visual impairments (VI), where remote sighted agents provide realtime navigational assistance to users with visual impairments via video-chat-like communication. In this paper, we conducted a literature review and interviewed 12 RSA users to compreh...

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones can overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-cont...

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of unprecedented hardship worldwide, bringing uncertainty to new levels as people’s routines were disrupted and what was once considered normal was called into question. Citizens initiated online local communities to support information-seeking amidst the pandemic. In this paper, we explore what types of info...

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology, where remote sighted workers, i.e., agents, provide real-time assistance to users with vision impairments via video-chat-like communication. Researchers found that agents' lack of environmental knowledge, the difficulty of orienting users in their surroundings, an...

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought forth wide-ranging, unanticipated changes in human interaction, as communities rushed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In response, local geographic community members created grassroots care-mongering groups on social media to facilitate acts of kindness, otherwise known as care-mongering. In this paper, w...

Volunteers in non-profit groups are a valuable workforce that contributes to economic development and supports people in need in the U.S. However, many non-profit groups face challenges including engaging and sustaining volunteer participation, as well as increasing visibility of their work in the community. To support non-profit groups' service, w...

This paper reviews logical approaches and challenges raised for explaining AI. We discuss the issues of presenting explanations as accurate computational models that users cannot understand or use. Then, we introduce pragmatic approaches that consider explanation a sort of speech act that commits to felicity conditions, including intelligibility, t...

Technology-enabled collaborative learning had been shown to be useful for improving student cognitive performance, promoting social interaction, and positive learning behavior. In this chapter, a utility to manage the logistics of group learning was explored to support collaborative learning and leverage a sense of accountability among group member...

Online symptom checkers (OSC) are widely used intelligent systems in health contexts such as primary care, remote healthcare, and epidemic control. OSCs use algorithms such as machine learning to facilitate self-diagnosis and triage based on symptoms input by healthcare consumers. However, intelligent systems' lack of transparency and comprehensibi...

Studies have shown that interpersonal relationships such as families and friends are an important source of support and encouragement to those who seek to engage in healthier habits. However, challenges related to geographic distance may hinder those relationships from fully collaborating and engaging in healthy living together. To explore this dom...

The notion of "independence'' is frequently used to motivate technology design in the HCI sub-field of accessible and assistive technology for people with disabilities. Despite the term's pervasive use, the literature lacks a recent articulation of its meaning in the context of assistive technology. What does independence really mean? Scoping the s...

When a family is engaged in healthy living practices together, it enhances the quality of life for all individuals. However, when members in families are separated over distance, the everyday encouragement and support may shift and obstacles arise within the family. In this study, we investigate non-collocated family members’ practices of healthy l...

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted universities around the world. In the two weeks following a shelter-in-place order, all the actors of the educational system were forced to transition to remote education. This shift required a new reliance upon technologies that these individuals might never have adopted at all, often wi...

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people's daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones has the potential to overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIG...

Family relationships can be resources to foster individuals' healthy behaviors. However, in many families, different factors can prevent members in supporting one another around positive health outcomes. A systematic understanding of these factors is crucial for developing appropriate solutions to reduce barriers on family collaboration in health p...

Remote sighted assistance provides prosthetic support to people with visual impairments (PVI) through internet-mediated conversational interactions. In these interactions, PVI broadcast live video to remotely-located, sighted people who engage in speech interactions with PVI to create prosthetic support. These interactions can be quite nuanced, cre...

People with visual impairments (PVI) must interact with a world they cannot see. Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology. We interviewed RSA assistants ("agents") who provide assistance to PVI via a conversational prosthetic called Aira (https://aira.io/) to understand their professional practice. We ide...

In many families, there are obstacles to support and collaborate with one another around positive health outcomes. One obstacle in providing support to one another occurs when family members are unaware of the need. In this study, we examine aspects of family conversations about health that affect family members’ decision to share (or not to share)...

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

Interest in artistry beer brewing has become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Within the brewing community, both professionals and amateurs engage their creativity when crafting their own beer. In this study, we are interested in understanding how members of the community support each other to be creative. Specifically, we investigat...

Prototype-driven design research often involves collecting and analyzing designed artifacts in annotated portfolios and design workbooks. These collections constitute important sources of intellectual influence for researchers, yet communicating this influence presents unique challenges, such as the difficulty of translating the aesthetic, material...

We developed TurkBench to better understand the work of crowdworkers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) marketplace. While we aimed to reduce the amount of invisible, unpaid work that these crowdworkers performed, we also probed the day-to-day practices of crowdworkers. Through this probe we encountered a number of previously unreported difficulti...

Paper prototypes have been successful for gathering concrete, grounded user feedback. Most of these prototypes are used to elicit feedback during bounded design sessions. However, for systems that support new social practices these bounded sessions do not fully materialize the interactions the prototype supports. This paper presents a case study of...

We report a codesign effort to envision a community water quality data platform with local stakeholders. We employed interviews, field observations, and hackathons through a 9-month study (ongoing). This codesign effort helps to distinguish our proposal of platform collectivism, in which local resources and stakeholders become more visible, accessi...

Kialo is a novel peer production system focused on pro/con debate construction. Distributed moderator teams vet and accept claims submitted by writers. Moderators also edit and refactor debates as they grow. Thus, moderators play a critical role in cultivating and maintaining debates. Conflict between moderators is typical. It is a feature of argum...

We have been investigating the proposition that framing and developing debates about issues, concepts, methods, and theories is a general approach to learning. Instructors, of course, do use debating, but not typically as a pervasive or core activity in a course curriculum. And there are many examples of debate as an informal learning activity, suc...

This book chapter is a synthesis of several empirical user studies of online learners enrolled in degree-earning educational programs. Our findings are drawn from interviews with both online students and instructors, regarding their perceptions and strategies of fostering an online community of learners. In contrast to traditional formal education...

People express their creativity through something that they enjoy doing. Through engagement in creative work, creators cultivate their identity, enhance problem-solving skills, and speak their thoughts and feelings. In this paper, we look into how a community of practice supports members in legitimizing their creativity. We conducted a user study w...

Incorporating health personas for older adults into design processes can help designers accurately represent older adults by evoking empathy, facilitating consideration of health issues and needs, and reducing stereotype reliance. Toward this goal, we create a two-level quantitative methodology for constructing persona skeletons from imbalanced dat...

We used content analysis of in-app driver survey responses, customer support tickets, and tweets, and face-to-face interviews of DHH Uber drivers to better understand the DHH driver experience. Here we describe challenges DHH drivers experience and how they address those difficulties via Uber's accessibility features and their own workarounds. We a...

Family relationships present a space for provision of support in which the members reciprocate and help one another at times of necessity. Yet, family members face obstacles in providing support to one another because they are unaware that it is needed. In this study, we investigated different motivating factors that influence family member’s decis...

Peoples lived experiences, stories, and memories about local places endow meaning to a community, which can play an important role in community engagement. We investigated the meaning of place through the lens of peoples memories of a local arts festival. We first designed, developed, and deployed a web application to collect peoples festival stori...

Coproduction is an important form of service exchange in local community where members perform and receive services among each other on non-profit basis. Local coproduction systems enhance community connections and re-energize neighborhoods but face difficulties matching relevant and convenient transaction opportunities. Context-aware recommendatio...

We report and reflect on a participatory design (PD) process in which we engaged with people with visual impairments (PVI) over an extended period of time; these interactions were aimed at understanding and assessing PVI experiences about shopping and assistive technologies. In particular, we examined in detail how PVI conduct grocery shopping with...

Understanding user behaviors and social relations in social media has been an important topic in Human-Computer Interaction research. In this paper, we look at an emerging form of social media, Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs), which support a special type of hybrid community where people are connected online to organize themselves for offline g...

This paper examines the role of community animators in technology adoption. Community animators are individuals that actively build social networks and broker ties between nodes in those networks. The present study observes technology adoption patterns through data collected from a mobile application at a local arts festival. A social network was c...

This paper explores a design study of a smartphone enabled meet-up app meant to inspire engagement in community innovation. Community hubs such as co-working spaces, incubators, and maker spaces attract community members with diverse interests. This paper presents these spaces as a design opportunity for an application that helps host community-cen...

Timebanking refers to community-based volunteering in which participants provide and receive services in exchange for time credits. Although timebanking takes advantage of web technologies, the lack of flexibility in managing web-based timebanking transactions and the difficulty of attracting younger adults whose contributions would be highly valua...

We are investigating community data, which is data gathered, analyzed, interpreted, and used by members of a local community. We discuss the ways that developing data literacy could result in more substantive civic participation and decision-making. Community members are already engaged in community data practices. Our goal is to help make these da...